Seasons

The history of seasons isn’t always what we think it is. Using the Australian summer as a baseline, when I was a child the Christmas cards all had snow on them. The pavement melted with heat and yet we were expected to believe that snow was going to fall. 

 

During the last forty years, Australia has finally come to expect that summer falls when summer falls, and that Christmas and New Year are warm. An interesting effect of this is that some people have asked “How were the seasons described in Australia prior to European settlement?” In my region, there were six seasons and those six seasons changed when certain plants bloomed, or when rivers filled, or when animals and insects were on the move. 

Because the seasons were described by set events rather than by fixed dates, they're a lot more precise than the European seasons translated to Australia. Some of our more recent popular beliefs work with the six season description, too. For instance, in Canberra, we say that heaters go on every year on ANZAC Day (25 April). Winter doesn’t begin until June: the imported seasons don’t match the calendar, so local customs act as a corrective. 

Jump back to England in the Middle Ages and this kind of discrepancy abounds. Chaucer describes April showers, but one of the key moments in the year isn’t in April, but on 25 March. The key dates for new year, tax, in fact, for most things were linked to key religious moments in the Christian calendar. One has to look at records of weather to find when the seasons changed, and one of the records of weather patterns is in literature. 

I should sit down and look at the studies of weather patterns for a region, and compare the literary and other documentation that show how people saw seasons, and compare them with that Christian calendar and the way it shaped peoples’ lives. Then I can see just what the differences are between the way I live the seasons and how they are described for my own life and compare that to the Middle Ages. 

I don’t have time for this, unfortunately. My research is in quite different fields right now, and I don’t even have the excuse that it will help my next novel. I suspect that this post is my reminder to myself that, one day, when I have time, I want to do this. It’d take a week, for I already have the resources and… I really want to know. What gaps were there between the documented seasons and the way people lived in the seasons in, say, thirteenth century England? 

This post was brought to you by a long summer’s night in the middle (of course) of a heat wave. January is not a cold month where I live.

Janus - by Gillian Polack

Yesterday I thought a lot of Janus. Christianity’s early rise as a major religion was strongly linked to the Roman Empire, so in the Julian and Gregorian calendars we have a month named after a god. More than one month, in fact, but today I shall focus on just that one. I love this. It reminds me, always, that the relationship between religions and the places they grow up help shape the way they shape us. I don’t want to talk about that today, however. I was thinking of Janus. 

In the Middle Ages (which is definitely the period of western European history I know most about) representations of Janus showed him as two-faced or three-faced. On a bad day, I would make Batman jokes about Two-Face, but today is a good day, and what interests me is what Janus means for the way people saw time in the Middle Ages.

Janus was two-faced on calendars because he looked back into the old year and forward into the new. This reflected something so important culturally that we still check our futures on horoscopes and we make resolutions for the New Year and we write “This is what 2018 was like.” Not everyone does all of this, but enough of us do these things that I have to suspect that this response to the change of years is a deep artefact.

It may date back to far earlier than the Middle Ages, and it may not. My evidence is Medieval. In the Middle Ages one gave nice gifts (gloves, for instance) to celebrate the new year. That was part of the looking forward, too. These presents were, I suspect, more important than anything given for Christmas itself, for we have a lot more listings of presents given for the new year than for any other part of Christmastide.

In the Jewish Middle Ages in the same western European countries, Janus does not appear. Jews used both the Christian calendar (for their everyday interactions with the majority part of the community) and their own, and the change of year was governed by the Jewish calendar and was, as it is now, in September/October. White was the colour of the New Year, so white food was popular. New food was popular and new clothes. 

The celebration of the calendar change focussed more on the forward and the cleansing of the slate than on looking back. I suspect this is because there is a formal ‘looking back’ during the ten days after the new year itself in the Jewish calendar. This means there isn’t as much of a call for it during the actual new year celebrations. 

Interestingly, Judaism and Christianity lived alongside each other in ancient Rome. 

Cultural remnants are not always an indication of worship. Christianity was the minor religion of the two nearly 2000 years ago but it adopted facets of Roman religion quite early. Judaism did not. The gods that label Jewish months are earlier deities from a different region. Just as Christians didn’t worship Janus just because Janus illustrated calendars and prompted people to look at both past and future on New Year, Jews didn’t worship the gods that appear on the Jewish calendar. 

If gods don’t indicate worship or even belief, what do they indicate? Why weren’t they dropped?

They are cultural remnants that act as reminders of the paths our cultures have travelled. I mostly like to think of it as a form of respect for our ancestors. Our world is very different to theirs. Some years, though, certain similarities strike. I look at Janus today and see something old that’s nevertheless very new and very important.

So many people assume that I am an ethnohistorian because the food history side of it is amazing. Well, the food history side of it is totally amazing. I’m not going to give it up in a hurry. My friends will suffer my experiments with old recipes for a long time yet. 

Cooking, however, is part of a vastly complex everyday and that everyday is our Janus-looking-backwards. I’m not actually a culinary historian. I’m an ethnohistorian. I need to understand people and their societies, not simply one element of them, but as much as I can.

Janus is important as an indicator of the strength of culture over time and of the legacy that culture gives us. Cultural artefacts can hang on or leave powerful echoes. Culture is not some neutral aspect of the universe: it’s our lives. Janus reminds us, every year, that we have a past as well as a future. If we’re wise and clever and remember to look back and think about that past, we’re more likely to walk into that future without as many burdens. If we stride forward blindly, then we’re carrying all kinds of burdens with us. 

Right now, with all the hate in our current world, it helps me to be able to look at the witch trials and back further at how the Inquisition targeted people who were Christian but with Jewish ancestors, and back further at the invention of the blood libel. All three of these vile parts of the past have carried forward into the present and are with us right now in a variety of forms. Imagine a Janus looking at mass murder in the past and then imagine him turning his head and looking at us, with a grim face. He’s seeing the same sights in both directions.

That’s the way I see Janus this year. We had a difficult 2018 and 2019 is going to be a challenge for many of us. The wonderful thing about looking at history through Janus’ eyes is that we know it. It doesn’t just change theoretically. We change it. We can choose to carry all those wonderful foodways forward and we can also say, “But we don’t need to carry this other thing.” 

Instead of a resolution, we can make a choice as to which aspects of culture we want to keep from those that Janus saw in the last year.

This isn’t where I meant to go with this month’s post. I was going to talk about the formal change to calendars. I wanted to talk about the libraries that keep the ephemera, including those cheap Jewish calendars from the seventeenth and eighteenth century that married the Christian year with the Jewish so that people could live in both, happily. Then I read the news and I thought that the only part of the calendar I wanted to talk about was Janus.

The news in Australia today was that our government in 1996-7 began a lot of the policies we so hate in 2018-9. 

Looking back colours what we see when we look forward. It also helps us to say “I don’t want this” and pushes us to action. This year, I can see precisely why Janus was so important when the year was depicted in the Christian Middle Ages. It was nothing to do with his ancestry as a god and everything to do with the help he gave in understanding what the year meant and how to handle its more impossible aspects.

OLD YEAR, NEW YEAR by H.M. Castor

January by the fireside – glass painting from Norwich, 1480-1500

(Image: Public Domain; source: Wikimedia Commons - see link here)

So, here we are on the 12^th day of 2012. Have you acclimatised, yet, to the new digit? Or do you pause, pen poised, over your cheques/forms/letters – as I do – wondering for a moment what year it is?

Actually, I must confess, this is a year-round hesitation for me, as I seem to have reached the stage (make that age) at which the years blur into one another, and I regularly feel, come the end of any December, that I am only just getting used to it being 2011 (or 2010, or 2009…) and, blow it, it’s about to change again.

This uncertainty puts me in mind of my childhood self’s astonishment at the fact that, whenever my mother was asked her age, she had to go through the rigmarole of working it out from her birth year. How – my 6-year-old self wondered, with something like outrage and something like pity – could anyone forget how old they were? It was unfathomable to me, when the year of being 6 was, well, so completely filled with 6-ish-ness (not to mention 6-and-a-quarter-ish-ness, and all the other nice divisions) – and, even more than that, was so interminably long! My age, at that time, was a matter of pride and of impatient anguish, and ran bright and strong through my very core like the words in a stick of rock. Nowadays I, of course (you guessed it) have to work it out, should anyone ask me, just like my mum.

But back to January. I have long been aware that in England, for several centuries prior to 1752 (and prior to 1600 in Scotland), the change of year occurred not on January 1^st, but on March 25^th, the Feast of the Annunciation. I've been aware of this mainly, I must admit, as an inconvenient fact – a nuisance, and a potential cause of errors in research.

It is only recently that I’ve begun to wonder about it.

(below: Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry – ‘January’)

Because, you see, at this period when the change of year occurred on March 25^th, January 1^st was still called “New Year’s Day”, and – since January 1st, and not December 25th, was the traditional time for exchanging gifts – the gifts of the season were called New Year’s gifts.

So, “New Year’s Day” was January 1^st – a day on which the year-number did not change. Then on March 25^th the year-number did change, but smoothly and silently, without celebration. (Samuel Pepys, for example, refers to January 1^st as New Year’s Day in his Diary, but does not change the year in his entries until March 25^th – when he does so without comment.) This apparently effortless double thinking about dates baffles and somehow rather impresses me.

How did it come about? For an answer, I have turned to Steve Roud’s excellent book The English Year:

In the ancient pre-Julian Roman calendar, there were ten months and the New Year started on 1 March (which is why the names of the months September to December derive from the words ‘seven’ to ‘ten’). It was Julius Caesar, when introducing what became known as the Julian calendar, who changed it to 1 January. This was the accepted ‘international standard’ when Christianity was being formed, but when the new religion began making headway, many followers thought that a specifically Christian view of the calendar should be adopted, and once the Nativity of Christ had been set at 25 December, many naturally argued that this day should be regarded as the beginning of the year. Others, counting nine months back from Christmas Day, argued that the Feast of the Annunciation, the conception of Christ (25 March), should really mark the beginning of the Christian year. The supporters of 25 March won the day, and…a dual system of New Years was thus created, which persisted for centuries.

Despite the fact that March 25^th was the official start of the year, Roud tells us that January 1^st “had been called New Year’s Day by people high and low, from at least the thirteenth century.” But what did the title mean to people at this time, if the day was not, in fact, the beginning of a new year? Was it widely known that January 1st had been the start of the year in Julius Caesar's time? Or did people barely even notice the strangeness of the situation, having known nothing else? (I suspect that we are all fully capable, like the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, of believing six impossible things before breakfast - as long as everyone else believes them too.) Anyway, I do hope that readers of this blog might be able to shed further light on the subject for me, in the comments box. Many thanks if you can!

Incidentally – for anyone thinking about tax deadlines this month – it’s interesting to note that when, in 1752, the English calendar finally was reformed, making January 1^st the beginning of the new year in fact as well as in name, the Exchequer decided not to make the change. However, the reform of the calendar entailed the ‘loss’ of 11 days, so instead of March 25^th, the new year for tax purposes began on April 6^th. As, of course, it still does.

I cannot possibly end this piece on the subject of tax, so I will leave you with two more things:

The first is a snapshot of Henry VIII on New Year’s Day (January 1^st) 1538, as a stream of people filed into the Presence Chamber bearing New Year gifts for him. The account is from a letter written two days later by John Husee to his patron Viscount Lisle:

The King stood leaning against the cupboard, receiving all things; and Mr Tuke at the end of the same cupboard, penning all things that were presented; and behind his Grace stood Mr Kingstone and Sir John Russell, and beside his Grace stood the earl of Hertford and my lord privy seal.

The nonchalance (or boredom?) of the king’s stance is a wonderfully vivid touch to the description (and it must have been a sturdy sideboard to support the leaning king as well as the weight of all those gifts – the portrait above was painted by Holbein at around that time). And I feel I can empathise a little with Mr (Brian) Tuke (below, again by Holbein); in our house on Christmas Day I have the equivalent job – trying to make a list of presents and their givers, in all the chaos of the unwrapping.

The purpose of my list is so that thank-you letters can be written to the right people for the right things. This leads me to the second thing with which I shall leave you. The recent death of the very great Ronald Searle has sent me scurrying to my shelves in search of Molesworth – and I do think that for anyone tackling children’s thank-you notes, The Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter (from How To Be Topp by Searle and Geoffrey Willans) is required reading. If anyone hasn’t encountered it before, you can find it here.

Happy New Year!

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK, and by Penguin in Australia.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

The Icelandic Year by Marie-Louise Jensen

I found several versions of Old Norse calenders when I was researching Vikings, and I found them fascinating. I used the old names of the months to structure my book Daughter of Fire and Ice and referred to them again in Sigrun's Secret.

The Norse world divided the year into the twelve lunar months, similar to our calender today. The difference is that each runs approximately from the middle of each one of our months to the middle of the next. And the names are far more colourful and descriptive of the time of year than ours. They are based mainly around the agricultural year which would have ruled the lives of most of the Norse. This version is specifically Icelandic and is taken from The Sagas of the Icelanders:

Harpa-month (mid April - mid May) Meaning unknown

Stekktíð or Lamb-fold time (mid May - mid June)

(Also known in some versions of the Norse calender as Skerpla)

Sólmánaður or Sun-month (mid June-mid July)

Miðsumar or Midsummer (mid July to mid August)

Heyannir or Hay-time (mid August to mid September

Haustmánuður or Harvest month (mid September to mid October)

Gormánuður or Slaughtering month (mid October to mid November)

Ýlir Meaning unknown (mid November to mid December)

Hrútmánuður or Ram month (mid December to mid January)

This month contains the festival of Jól (or Yule) and is sometimes known by the colourful name Mörsugur or Fat sucking month.

Þorri or Thorri month, meaning unknown (mid January to mid February)

Góa or Goa month, thought to be named after a forgotten goddess (mid February to mid March)

Einmánuður or Last month of Winter (mid March to mid April)

I love that the year started with spring, rather than with the depths of winter. And I adore all the names which I hope I've rendered correctly. I found they helped me greatly in my task of visualising the lives of the people I was writing about.